Typeface design involves creating set of letters or other characters having unique aesthetic qualities. Typeface design involves shaping individual glyphs (i.e., curves) of different characters and eventually incorporating multiple curves into an eye-pleasing font or other typeface. Furthermore, typography, which involves arranging letters to make a set of characters readable and appealing when presented, involves various factors (e.g., point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing, letter-spacing, etc.) that can be affected by typeface design choices.
To facilitate typeface design, certain design applications are used to modify the appearance of various characters in typefaces. For instance, a typeface design application displays a character, such as a “b” character, in a graphical interface. The typeface design application modifies one or more visual attributes of the character's design responsive to input received via the graphical interface. Examples of these inputs include the width of certain component shapes of the character (e.g., the width of a stem in the “b” character), the curvature of certain component shapes of the character (e.g., the curvature of a bowl in the “b” character), etc. Modifying these visual attributes results in a new design for characters in a typeface.
Existing typeface design applications impose certain limitations on design modifications. For instance, some design applications are limited to modifying typefaces with straight lines, and therefore have limited capability to develop unique fonts having glyphs with extensive curvature. Other design applications are used to modify typeface designs by moving an outline of a typeface, where an outline includes a set of lines defining the perimeter of a particular character. But modifying an outline of a character could result in unintended errors. For instance, separately moving one or more points along the outline can result in a character design that is unrecognizable if changes are not applied consistently (e.g., because one side of the character is skewed with respect to the other). Therefore, a user must manually make the same changes to corresponding portions of an outline (i.e., the top and bottom of a stem or other component shape), which increases the time required for typeface design and decreases the precision with which changes are applied to different portions of a character.
For these and other reasons, existing typeface design applications present disadvantages.